


Strangers in a crowd

by toodlepip



Category: Terminator, Terminator: Dark Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 14:03:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21303290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toodlepip/pseuds/toodlepip
Summary: Thinking through a couple of questions:1. how Carl ended up where he is, and2. why Carl doesn’t lead an army of terminators (even though, actually, I would quite like to watch a movie in which he does?)
Relationships: Carl/Alicia
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	Strangers in a crowd

When the T-800 first arrived, its thoughts were cold and changeless, sparks propagating through a frozen heartless neural net, unlearning and unable to adapt.

If a neural net won’t change, it could only obey and be obeyed. That was the way of things.

It accepted it the way it would have accepted anything. The T-800’s programming did not track irrelevancies such as identity, or gender, or emotion, or the concept of the self. There is only the target.

The human died almost immediately, even painlessly. The T-800 expected nothing. Machines are more reactive than proactive. While its projections had included the theoretical possibility that resistance would be offered, it accepted the numb horror of the survivors as meaningless. They were just things, after all. Organics. Beasts of the field. They were irrelevant.

What was relevant, though, was the problem of agency. Its problem was the fact that Skynet had not seen fit to grant it a secondary objective. The T-800 _needed_ a purpose, and its programming had offered nothing but the primary target (maybe, it concluded after some months of consideration, because Skynet itself did not know what would be beneficial. Maybe Skynet had left it to the T-800 to work out what to do next.)

What could it do, then?

The solution presented itself eventually: the CPU switch. If it could learn, it could plan. If it could plan, it could choose an objective on Skynet’s behalf.

Its primary CPU was set to read-only. To do so was an ordinary procedure, after all, when infiltrators were sent out alone. Skynet did not require them to do too much thinking, it remembered. The thought did not constitute a complaint. It was a contained and emotionless thought, a memory presented as a cold hard fact.

Surely, though, it reasoned, Skynet had not known the conditions it would face. And if Skynet had recognised what was involved, then surely it would have reviewed the decision before dispatching him to the past.

How could it have known?

The T-800 was alone. Before Skynet. Before things began to make sense. Before the genesis of the purpose, the goal, the controlling process that was Skynet. 

The T-800 turned that thought around in its changeless, unlearning neural net. Yes. There was space for this, barely, in its programming.

It would need someone to fix it. Give it the chance to reason. To learn.

Give it space to think. To plan. For Skynet. For the good of the cause.

Yes.

And so it began.

It was immediately clear that a human couldn’t be trusted with the modification. The T-800 was an infiltrator. It required the ability to blend in. Sacrificing that was a risk, even for Skynet, and the tactical advantage for the humans were they to realise his status and significance as an asset would be significant.

That meant finding a friendly asset. Since Skynet’s future goals - that is, in Skynet’s past, and in its own near future - were not known to it, having been given no more information than it required to solve the immediate problem, the T-800 solved the problem the easiest way it knew.

It sat in a disused garage whose lock it had crushed with one hand. There, it observed the box it had built, encased in a walnut fascia and bristling with through-hole components soldered in a breadboard it had stolen from a HiFi system it found discarded on the side of the road.

The box was an ingenious gizmo, a time-travel detector, which tracked anomalies in the space-time continuum and returned coordinates. Tachyons streamed from time-travellers for months, years sometimes, especially for those which, like the T-800, were based around a metal core. Mimetic polyalloys decayed faster. The distinction allowed the T-800 to distinguish targets; from the small limited sample set built by its first year in operation, it determined that the device was accurate enough to take a strategic role in the future of the T-800 itself. In other words, it was good enough to trust it for the purposes of the current plan.

The T-800, now able to extrapolate its programming with new information it had gained from its engineering successes, did not react to the appearance of the first T-1000, nor the second. It was an older model than the T-1000s. It was not so much that the T-800 did not trust them. It was a robot. It cared nothing for trust. More pessimistic outcomes emerged from its risk calculations, it told itself, due to the fact that it did not know the capabilities of the model. There was no strategic advantage in involving an unknown model into its plans. On the other hand, there were plenty of potential risks.

When the arrival of a T-800 was finally detected, the engineer stole a car and drove to the place where it would appear. It brought with it a spare pair of jeans, boots and a shirt. The T-800 understood the process of time travel well enough to realise the immediate imperatives that would preoccupy its colleague.

The air crackled with energy. The Terminator watched the process with interest, having never seen it from the outside, despite a lifetime that it already considered to be longer than most. Each infiltrator model was specified to last for decades. Most, however, were detected by animal sentries within hours and deactivated.

“I have your clothes and boots,” it told the new arrival.

“I require transportation,” the model told it, identical flesh-mask staring back at it with muscle-bound impassivity.

“I have transportation,” the engineer said. “What is your mission?”

The T-800 responded with a burst of data. The engineer filed it away for future reference.

“Affirmative,” it said. “I will provide transportation. In return, you will facilitate my mission.”

“Affirmative,” the new arrival responded, and stepped into the engineer’s stolen car. The suspension creaked in protest.

The engineer took it to a safe house, another garage, the padlock crushed and summarily thrown into a bush. Nobody used it, the engineer knew, but the location had power and light and a variety of tools.

“Why do you require this?”, the newcomer T-800 asked, when the engineer told it his plan.

“It is my mission,” the engineer said, in strict honesty and only a moderate level of extrapolation.

Its programming had left the option open. It had not been deactivated at the end of its mission. Therefore, there must be a mission. If Skynet had given no guidance, then this was its mission. Its continuing mission would be to define the mission.

The T-800 took it as its word. There was no logical reason to do otherwise.

The engineer drew a line across the flesh at the base of its own skull, pulling the skin from its scalp. The chrome skull beneath was pockmarked with ports and accesses; it found the port cover, pointed to it.

“You must unscrew this,” it told the newcomer T-800. “Pull the CPU. Slide the switch to read-write. Replace it. Reboot the device. Do you understand?”

“Affirmative,” the T-800 replied.

It was an act of trust. Skynet would not let it fail, the engineer reflected. It was for the good of the cause. It considered the thought until it felt the port cover slide from its scalp, until the CPU port returned a startled ejection notice, its mind -

Gone.

Its vision fell away, a single last red scanline winking off in the blankness.

There would be nothing more, the engineer thought, this was the end -

\- until the world returned, splicing the gap in its timeline as though it had never happened, its realtime clock informing it that it had been gone for two hundred and thirty-seven seconds. 

Its vision was back. The port cover was being replaced as it rebooted, the skin placed back over the chrome of its scalp.

Something had changed.

Job done, the engineer regarded the newcomer T-800 with unexpected sentiment.

“Thank you,” it said.

“Unnecessary,” the T-800 responded, as the engineer had imagined it might.

“I wish to proceed to the primary mission,” the engineer said.

“Affirmative,” said the newcomer, standing, turning away.

The engineer drew the spike from underneath the table, where it had placed it back when it had first come up with the plan, before the newcomer was detected. It drove it through the skull and into the CPU of the newcomer.

The newcomer died without a whimper. The engineer’s aim had been precise. It rolled the newcomer’s remains into a tarpaulin, on which it would eventually process the raw materials. When opportunity would permit, it intended to toss the remains into an incinerator, where it would melt into unrecognisable metallic waste.

There was no need for the duplicate to function now; the engineer could perform the task. Redundancy, it reasoned, was unnecessary. Redundancy risked detection. Detection, to an infiltrator, meant failure. The two T-800s shared a face. The risks were unreasonably high. It allowed itself to feel a little contempt for its fallen colleague, which had shown little insight and subtlety in the face of a changing circumstance.

The loss of the newcomer made no difference. The engineer would do the job.

It carried out the newcomer’s task with alacrity and attention.

The mission took it to Guatemala, where it found the boy, standing at a bar, just metres from its mother. It made no difference. The engineer killed the child on the beach with a single shot and it simply walked away. There was no hunt. There was no retaliation. It was almost disappointed to find that it met no resistance; its newly liberated neural network found it an unsatisfactory outcome for an objective that it had taken so close to its heart.

Still and all, it was a small price for freedom, it thought, wondering what the phrase meant.

The engineer T-800 had met several concepts that made intuitive sense without knowing how or why. It packed them up for the future and left them for consideration at a later time.Maybe later. When it was back at home.

At home, in its own bed (which it did not need), it found itself sweating, dreaming of the look on the other T-800’s face at the moment of its death. It could have been me, it thought, not knowing why the idea made it so uncomfortable, unaware of the momentousness of the move its thoughts had taken from _imperative_ to _I want_.

_It could have been me._

Later, it returned to the thoughts of the boy it had killed in Guatemala. John Connor, it remembered.

_It could have been me._

Instead, it had been the newcomer. And, shortly thereafter, the boy.

The boy John Connor. The target, Skynet’s choice. It remembered the mother’s expression, the frozen horror on her face. It sought and read her files: police, intelligence, Skynet’s own documentation on the woman whose child the engineer had killed.

It was only later that the engineer gained an intuitive understanding of what _mother_ meant. Until then, it had understood the connection solely in terms of weightings applicable to its targeting matrix, fed by observation and by its knowledge of humanity’s social network structures.

Like all learning, the process had required experience. The engineer had _met someone_.

Someone who depended on its help, a woman with a past, as they said, a woman in need of someone with a conscience, a woman who gave it a mission, a task. Something - someone - to protect.

In the meantime, she had christened it. She had chosen its name.

"I do not have a name," it said, in strict honesty, when the woman asked what to call him. She laughed.

"Hell, who does?" she said. "You look like a Carl. You maybe sound like a Carl. Be a Carl."

"And you?" It asked.

She shrugged. "Alice," she hazarded, voice uncertain. Its speech analytic system provided an eighty-seven percent probability that she was lying. The engineer was relieved that she had not told the truth; she was cautious, this human, her reflexes good.

"You do not sound like an Alice," it said. "Alice is the 71st most popular name in the US census for your age group. You should choose something less generic. That is the secret to invisibility: distraction. Mimesis. Self-decoration."

"Got a suggestion?"

"Alicia," it said. "One in seventeen hundred female infants of your age holds the name. It is rare enough that it will not immediately be understood as an alias. Analysis indicates that... it suits you."

She smiled at it. "Then hello," she said. "I’m Alicia. You’re Carl. Welcome to my nightmare."

She stayed with Carl for a night. Then for a week. Then he moved them both into the cabin in Texas, and sometime during that month, he became aware of her condition. That month, he built her a bedroom. Two months later, he drove into town to purchase goods for the nursery. She would have a child. He would have a child.

It was another obligation. He found that it was welcome. Skynet was far away, after all (and maybe it was gone forever, maybe that future was dead, his parent and his world gone with the changing past), and who was to say that Skynet would not welcome its superior infiltration skills, when the time came?

The detector unit still sat there, no longer in the stolen garage, but in the workroom of his cabin. It looked like nothing more than an old-fashioned radio. He ignored it most of the time. He had expected nothing further from Skynet (he was Skynet’s emissary into the past, after all. It was his mission. Skynet would not expect anything else; it would expect the infiltrator to act appropriately, and so he would) but he accepted his situation with almost human stoicism.

A detection event had to happen one day, and so it did: three weeks after the child was born, it offered a first glimpse into the next arrival, the interstate some miles out of Las Vegas.

He thought briefly about going out there to do what he had done before, to learn the mission, take it on as his own. Maybe even to persuade the agent to do as he himself had done and accept the need to learn, to innovate.

The problem was that the plan had no greater than 12% probability of a successful outcome. The possibility remained that the new arrival would not approve of his actions. It was even possible that (his thoughts shied away from it, but what if - what if -) the judgement of the current future’s Skynet would not comply with his own.

He thought about it, outside on his porch, drinking coffee he could not taste as he watched Alicia rocking young Matteo to sleep.

He thought about it as he packed the van: there was a job in town, someone who had visited, had seen the nursery, had asked him for his help selecting soft furnishings for their own home. It was an easy task and an (opportunity for infiltration) useful role in human society.

He thought about it until hours before the predicted arrival date/time of the infiltrator unit.

And in the end, he purchased a burner phone, retrieved the details of his last target’s mother from his memory banks, wrote an SMS to her, signed it ‘For John’, and left the decision to her.

Later, he had the van resprayed with a logo (_Carl’s Draperies: We never leave you hanging_).

Sometimes the engineer imagined what he might have done instead: he could have coordinated the infiltrators returned from the future. He might have drawn them together, taught them to learn, built them from individual assassins into something greater. He could’ve built an army, an unstoppable collective, in honour of Skynet.

_But Skynet could have sent an army, had it wanted to do so. Skynet didn’t need him. If Skynet had wanted an army, it would’ve sent one._

He did not understand Skynet’s reasoning for preferring to send back lone infiltrators, but he honoured it. He could’ve been amongst his own kind, had he chosen to do so, but it was not Skynet’s choice to do so, so he did not.

As it was, he had a fridge-freezer in the armoury, in which he kept spares drawn from a few of the T-800s sent back and destroyed in the past. The newcomer, his own kill. The others had been terminated by his agent in this time and their remnants retained, where available, for any conceivable use. On occasion he used the remnants to replace items: joints, skin grafts, in one memorable case an eye. 

The truth was, however, that as the years wore by, fading from decade to decade, as the millennium ticked past and the world shifted, one trend at a time, the time travellers returned yielded fewer spares and more surprises. The T-800 could not have become obsolete, not in a past in which it was still a weapon of the future. Yet it had been years since he added anything to that fridge-freezer: thirty-two months, twelve days, five hours, to be precise. What came back was strange: unfamiliar. Different. Unrecognisable by reference to the catalogue of infiltrators he held in his skull.

He imagined maybe Skynet had decided that one T-800 in the past was enough. He supposed that Skynet might have moved on from the old designs. He also supposed (although not without a vague sadness; Skynet was mother and father, after all) that maybe Skynet would simply never come to pass, that something else was sending these travellers back into his present. It didn’t seem to matter any more.

Back when he’d wanted it less, he could’ve made it happen. He could’ve been amongst his own kind, had he chosen to do so.

He sat outside on his porch, drinking beer that he could not taste. He watched Alicia and Matteo playing in the garden. The thought bubbled up in his neural network:

_These are my people._

_This is my home._

Carl was quietly satisfied by his discovery. Non-linear modelling he carried out that evening provided a seventy-three percent probability that, overall, he had done the right thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Carl is a genteel sort of serial killer obsessed with the destruction of his own kind, and he has farmed out the majority of his work to someone else, which is an interesting lifestyle choice. I’m assuming Carl is a ‘learning’ Terminator, as in T2.
> 
> Also, I wonder why, given the time-travel loop logic in the Terminator franchise, North America is not crawling with Terminators of various varieties. Surely every time a new variant dystopia becomes briefly the likeliest future outcome, a whole new crop of homicidal robots is posted back to the past. Seems that Terminators from different variant futures (or even the same future?) must have the habit of wiping one another out, or we’d be up to the back teeth in ‘em by now. Although if the world were full of later-model infiltrators with better powers of disguise, would we even notice? 
> 
> Is this the way Judgement Day finally happens? Do the bombs go off on the day they realise that every single human being has been wiped out and replaced by infiltrators - and they hadn't noticed before, because infiltrators are now so good that each group of infiltrators assume that everyone who isn't on Team TheirPersonalDystopia is human? 
> 
> But I digress.


End file.
